Tag Archives: hegemony

Stumbled on a clipping I thought I would never find. A letter to the Guardian on Monday 30th October, 2000 If anyone should want to form a clear picture of just how much British society has been dumbed down in … Continue reading →

Long-term readers will know of my neologism “nulture.” I wheel this one out when I encounter a claim (usually in advertising) that a product is equivalent to nature, or more natural than nature itself. They come in two main varieties, … Continue reading →

rei·fi·cation (-f-kshn) n. the conversion of an abstract concept into something concrete; a viewing of the abstract as concrete. My love for the Financial Times has price elasticity. As in, I still pony up for it at the eye-watering and … Continue reading →

From an essay in the latest (Sept 2011) Soundings: One counter-intuitive feature was that, in the dark days of her electoral unpopularity, Thatcher brilliantly summoned to the rescue, not market rationality but an archaic British nationalism. The Falklands War allowed … Continue reading →

This is a kind of sequel to a post I did about elephants and hyenas and tigers (oh my). Rebecca Solnit has a good section in her book “A Paradise Built in Hell” (review here) about the social construction of … Continue reading →

Following up from Chomsky’s forensic analysis, here’s a short provocative piece by Robert Paterson about Middle Eastern policy and who is allowed to behave abominably. Do note, he’s deploying simile, not metaphor. My main quibble with his thesis would be … Continue reading →

“In imperial Vietnam, tiger/elephant fights were staged for the emperor. But the tiger’s teeth were blunted and its claws cut short: the elephant was the symbol of the emperor, and so of course it always had to win. In one … Continue reading →